June, north of the equator

June is the month the garden stops being about planting and starts being about keeping. Everything is in, everything is growing, and the difference between a good July and a poor one is decided now by water, food and how often you go and look. Nothing in this month is urgent on any single day and all of it is urgent across a fortnight.

In the garden

Keep sowing. French beans, beetroot, carrots, chard, lettuce, radish, spring onions and salad leaves all go in directly, and a fortnightly row of lettuce is worth more than a single long one. Sow biennials for next year, including wallflowers, foxgloves and sweet william, in a spare corner where they can grow on until autumn and be moved in September.

Plant out the last of the tender things. Bougainvillea, delosperma and any container plant that spent the winter under cover can go out with confidence now. Echinacea and other perennials raised from seed are ready to plant into their final positions, and they will still make a decent clump before the year turns.

Water deeply and mulch. A single long soak that reaches the root zone does more than five sprinklings, and a mulch of compost after watering keeps it there. Pinch out the tops of broad beans to slow the blackfly, tie in the climbing beans, and start picking sweet peas every day, because a pod allowed to set stops the plant.

In the house

The plants are at their peak. Water on the shortest interval of the year, feed every fortnight or so, and expect fast growth in anything with decent light. This is also the best month for taking cuttings of almost anything, because the growth is soft and rooting is quick.

Watch the ones outside. A pot on a patio in June dries far faster than the same pot in a living room, and a plant that wilted once will show it in smaller leaves for the rest of the summer. Shade the succulents from the strongest afternoon sun until they have hardened up, because even a jade plant can burn after a winter indoors.

Give the summer flowering houseplants a potash feed rather than a general one. Hoya, streptocarpus and clivia all set flowers on the strength of what they get now, and a nitrogen feed at this point buys leaves instead.

What not to do yet

Do not prune the spring flowering shrubs any later than this, or you will remove next year’s flowers. Do not repot unless something is desperate, because a plant in full growth resents the disturbance more now than in spring. And do not let the sweet peas set a single pod.